The core facilities will maintain and expand the Vision Research Center established in the Department of Ophthalmology at Washington University to provide essential services for faculty members whose research interests are in one or another aspect of vision. The Vision Research Center significantly facilitates the interaction between several investigators and makes it possible for them to advance their ongoing research, most of which is supported by individual research grants from NEI. The current application requests support for one year for a continuing service module (the electronics and machine shops) and a new EM module. Core grant support for one year only is requested, even though this is the time for our fives years competing renewal application, because the department is in a state of transition with the arrival of Dr. Henry Kaplan, as chairman, in April, 1988. Dramatic expansion of the clinical and research faculty will occur in the next 12 months and the configuration of the Core Grant will be significantly different in June, 1989 from that requested in this application (please see Background for details).